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Holding Governments Accountable

The Global Call to action against Poverty (GCAP) established four key policy demands: debt cancellation, trade justice, a major increase in the quantity and quality of aid and national accountability focusing on just governance and the fulfilment of human rights. To realise these policy demands, the struggle to hold governments’ accountable to their political promises remains a primary challenge for civil society.

Holding governments accountable requires not only a technical process of monitoring based on facts and reliable statistics, but also a political process of empowering civil society to mobilise and participate effectively in democratic processes. To do so, civil society stakeholders need to join together in partnership to collectively reflect on its best and worst practices and undertake rigorous political analysis to identify collective tools and processes to hold governments accountable.

Mapping accountability reporting processes:

Inventory of global and government monitoring, accountability reporting processes and (participatory) budgeting initiatives (Draft Oxfam NoVIB)
Inventory of monitoring and reporting initiatives on poverty, gender and MDG-related issues (Draft Social Watch)
Mapping of organisations working on public accountability (Draft CIVICUS 2007)